Revue Starlight – Series Finale (Review)

Revue Starlight started off with a bang with its original plot that felt inspired by the dark side to Kunihiko Ikuhara’s works. Afterwards it was a hit or miss until a Future Diary sized ball dropped, exposing Nana as a girl that has won the auditions and has her classmates repeat the same performance until the arrival of Hikari Kagura. Hikari betrays Karen in a scene that hurt viewers all over the world and now, Karen appears before Hikari to pull her away from the consequences of Karen’s loss but will Hikari accept this? Sigh. There’s no easy way to say this so I’ll just get to it.

The ending left a whole fucking lot to be desired. Perhaps Karen winning was supposed to convey that one should fight even the odds are stacked against them and I could slightly get behind that if…IF Karen didn’t lose to Hikari AGAIN on the alternate plane of their universe. Her win not only felt cheap and a rush to reach an ending, but even most of the dialogue was weird. Dancing back and forth between quoting the play that reflects their own tragic parting and randomly showing viewers the other characters eating a meal. Karen is about to confront her trashy, manipulative hinted girlfriend; I don’t give a damn about the rest of them eating some fucking food. The fuck?

Revue Starlight uses the final episode to tell viewers that you should fight for a happy ending to be with the one you love instead of shaping Karen to be 100% convincible of pulling off the wins she may quite frankly not deserve towards the end…especially not this one. I wanted to root for her, but even if her heart was in the right place, deep down Karen still needed to get her shit together. Overall, Revue Starlight is a more than decent anime but perhaps not fully worthy of the Ikuhara comparisons I have made. This is probably bad to say but it would have been sooooo much better if they killed each other to win. What does that about me? Most likely that I’ve watched way too much fucked up shows like Magical Girl Raising Project and Madoka Magica to the point where I want anime girls in dramatic situations to kill each other. Do I care? No. Ok…slightly.